Office furniture – chairs, cubicles, tables, and more – represent a massive waste stream that’s often ignored, but which can make a huge difference in the overall footprint of a company.
When a corporation empties or renovates an office space, much of the interior assets – furniture, supplies, appliances, computers – end up in the landfill.
The amount of furniture waste (f-waste) is staggering: research shows it’s about 10 million tons of office equipment and furniture ends up in the landfill every year in North America alone.
But there is a better way.
Green Standards works with large companies and their real estate teams to plan and manage sustainable office decommissioning through the removal of their furniture, while facilitating the in-kind donations of these items to local organizations in need.
And these are big projects: they work with footprints starting at 20,000 square feet (about 100 employee office) all the way to millions of square feet at the largest corporate campuses in North America.
Green Standards works to help businesses, like Adobe, United Airlines, and Georgia Pacific, sustainably repurpose their office furniture through a combination of resale, recycling and in-kind donations – and they are doing a lot of it.
To date, Green Standards has diverted 58,000 tons of office waste – keeping it out of the landfill and coordinating donations to other organizations that can reuse the furniture.
The focus is on sustainable reuse of remaining inventory, this is what separates them from those that are adding to the landfill and charging clients for it.
Reference- Green Standards website, Clean Technica